Medical Trauma Is Not An Overreaction To Being Sick
Medical trauma is not an overreaction to being sick. It is an understandable response to...
Violations of bodily autonomy
Abuse of power
Extreme physical trauma & near-death experience
Neglect of pain and suffering
Disregard for life
Imprisonment
And more...
TW the following slides will discuss these topics in detail.
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Violations of Bodily Autonomy
Many people have bodily autonomy ignored during medical emergencies. In best practice, medics should ask for consent before any procedure. However, in reality, this consent may be forced, the patient may be told they must consent or they will die, or it may simply be forgotten or ignored. Medical procedures are often extremely invasive and can involve both painful and personal violations of bodily autonomy.
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Abuse of Power
Patients may be forced to take medication they do not want, forced to comply with treatment programs against their will, or simply berated and verbally abused. Doctors have extreme power over patients, they have the ability to unlock or take away life-saving medications and pain relief. So it is no wonder patients are often coerced or forced into medical treatment they do not want. Abuse of power is especially problematic in psychiatric care where the doctor has the power to imprison the patient at any time under a forced mental hold under many laws.
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Extreme Physical Trauma & Near-death Experiences
Even if doctors are doing everything right, medical conditions or accidents can cause extreme physical trauma. Surgery and recovery from surgery are extremely painful and can be traumatic. Neurological events where speech, memory, motor function, eyesight and more can be lost in a second are terrifying experiences that can be traumatic. Near-death experiences often occur in medical settings and are traumatic, the fear of dying can also be traumatic as in cancer scares or migraines that mimic strokes.
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Neglect of Pain and Suffering
Mistakes or overcrowding in triage can lead to patients with extreme pain in ED being ignored for long periods of time. Patients also may find their pain ignored because doctors do not believe them or they are trapped in a referral cycle with unhelpful providers. Just as consistent neglect in childhood can lead to the traumatic response of deprioritizing your needs, so can these experiences of neglect.
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Disregard for Life
Over the course of the pandemic, we have seen chronically ill patients deprioritized and killed over and over again as governments place the economy over vulnerable lives. Many of us have even had friends or family make comments about lockdowns or vaccines completely ignoring that their attitudes directly contribute to the deaths of people like us. This societal disregard for life can be traumatizing.
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Imprisonment
Many patients may be forced to complete inpatient programs they do not want because of abuse of power. This includes abusive pain rehab clinics and also psychiatric care. Additionally, patients may become imprisoned in their own homes or beds, not provided with any mode of transport to leave the house, and unable to walk more than a few meters or at all. They may live with people who refuse to allow them to access help if their illness is invisible. All of these scenarios can leave vulnerable people in pain with no way to access support networks or medical help.
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Common Threads
A common thread among all of these scenarios is loss of control. We treat disabled people as children and often take away their rights to self-advocate and control their own lives. For adults who had lived independently, this loss of control can be traumatic. For people who have control of their lives forcibly removed, they can have a trauma response doing anything possible to stay in control in the future.
Another common thread is fear of death as we naturally form traumatic memories of experiences we deem potentially deadly. Fear of death is often the motivator behind coercion and is the reason why there is such a power imbalance.
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C-PTSD
Trauma exists to protect us from re-experiencing traumatic events. However, for people with chronic medical conditions, the same traumatic experience may happen over and over again. Therefore people with medical trauma may also experience C-PTSD or chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. For people with medical trauma from repeated episodes of chronic illness therapy that tells us that what happened is over and not going to happen again is not helpful. We may be unable to avoid triggers as they are necessary parts of our lifesaving treatment.
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The Takeaway
Medical trauma contains similar circumstances to many other traumatic experiences like sexual assault, domestic abuse, child abuse, and war. But it is also unique and can require different approaches. This is why it is so important for anyone who identifies with the medical trauma listed here to seek out a mental health practitioner trained in helping people with chronic illness and medical trauma. Please don't go through this alone. Many chronic illness support groups can recommend good therapists who understand what we've been through, some of whom have the chronic illness themselves!
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Medical trauma is real and unfortunately common within the chronic illness community. In addition to the medical gaslighting often discussed on this platform, medical experiences can be traumatic for a huge variety of reasons.
I want to emphasize that I am not a mental health professional and if you do identify with medical trauma it is incredibly important to seek help from a trauma-informed therapist. Preferably one with experience treating patients with chronic illness and medical trauma.
While all medical trauma is unique, it is important to highlight and raise awareness for the strong power imbalance in many medical situations. Doctors have the power to grant or refuse living-saving and life-changing treatments. They have the power to decide who suffers unbearable pain and who gets relief.
In addition, patients with non-visible symptoms like chronic pain and chronic fatigue diseases like MECFS, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease and neurological disease are often completely reliant on doctors supporting them to access basic needs like food and housing. This can make every doctor-patient interaction a life or death situation even in scenarios where someone's life is not directly threatened by illness.
Not to mention that not all medical trauma comes from medical mistakes. Sometimes in order to save a patient's life painful surgeries, treatments or interventions are necessary.
However, while some medical trauma is unavoidable, it can be massively decreased by increasing awareness of medical trauma among practitioners and stressing the importance of informed consent making patients aware of all their treatments options and ensuring they do not feel pressured to choose one path.
Additionally when unavoidable traumatic events happen there should be mental health support available. Just as we would care for physical complications of medical treatment, we also have a responsibility to care for the mental complications of healthcare and seek to minimize them.
To everyone with medical trauma reading this, your diagnosis is valid, you deserve care and pain relief, and you are not faking your illness. You are a fighter and deserve respect.
